keyword "pot" title "the very idea of florida" in misc. flash fiction

The idea that EPCOT Center’s Spaceship Earth looks like a gigantic golf ball is a tired comedy premise unless you add in a gigantic golfer who, before her mighty swing, must yell “FOUR… HUNDRED… THOUSAND!” The idea that the shape of Florida means it’s just America’s wang is a tired comedy premise unless you add that it’s at a urinal shaking off a last couple of drops as represented by the Florida Keys.

The idea of the Bay of Pigs invasion, refugees failing at Fidel’s overthrow, is really depressing
unless you imagine them all as Ricky Ricardo from “I Love Lucy”, throwing bongos at Castro while laughing “EEEH-EEEEH-EEEEEH-EEEEEEH!” The idea of the Cuban Missile Crisis,
our nearest-miss at annihilation, is really depressing until you remember how many Americans now pay good money for escapist entertainment about the apocalypse. We are so economically screwed that scavenging scraps in a radioactive ruin has more hope and upward mobility than our world never burnt down, simply conquered by loan officers and pawn shops.

The very idea of Florida where cockroaches keep getting bigger and the grandmothers’ dogs keep getting smaller, someday they’ll cross and keep going in the other directions, our grandmothers forced to adapt to dogs small enough to crawl under the refrigerator for table scraps along with cockroaches large enough to take a chunk out of the mailman, but it’ll still be a part of America? Florida, where they stopped making Space Shuttles but churn out bath salt faster than an elderly Democrats can accidentally vote for Pat Buchanan because the ballots are ill-designed, changing the leader of the free world? This very idea of Florida.

A melting pot of various refugees, huddled, yearning to be free as well as Spring Break pilgrims
show their boobs to a “Girls Gone Wild” crew in exchange for a t-shirt and beer because they’re still mad at Daddy for not getting them that pony. A place for old men and women to finally rest secure in the knowledge their jai alai gambling debts will be passed down to their children and their children’s children in the most American tradition of them all. A place where conservatives vote down school taxes so public schools can never corrupt Christian children with concepts like reason or justice, equal rights or geometry. A place for professional athletes to live where they can dodge income taxes in the states that made them richer than gods.

A melting pot for all this, melting together in a place where the humidity somehow manages to be one hundred and thirteen percent, violating all laws of science, right in line with their school systems, literally melting together in that oppressive heat into a mass of paranoid delusion, the very idea of Florida. Where the Protestant Churches and the theme parks met, shook hands and exchanged faces like in that one bad Nicolas Cage movie, therein beginning the collapse of our great national experiment.

But hey, it sure beats the snow in February, right?